When Will City Planners & City Councilors Learn From Their Mistakes?

When Will City Planners & City Councilors Learn From Their Mistakes?

The Planners Pledge is a serious document, including a formal apology for the role planners played in creating the most inhospitable elements of our cites, including car dependent sprawl and its host of toxic environmental and health maladies. For those who resisted the legions of planning professionals and their transportation cohorts, the newly-discovered wisdom of designing cities for people and not cars has come much too late and has been replaced by a new and equally pernicious monetization of our lives.

Unfortunately, the planning profession’s old mantra of suburban mobility planning under the influence of the automobile industry has been replaced with a new mantra of density everywhere, under the influence of corporate real estate financialization.

Don’t Let Kane Realty Trash Midtown Raleigh!

Don’t Let Kane Realty Trash Midtown Raleigh!

When you’re a billionaire developer and want something from the public, why bother with obeying the law and showing due respect for your neighbors when it’s easier and more profitable to dispense with public review and successfully lobby the General Assembly to change the law? This is a story about a betrayal of our Midtown neighborhoods, but there is a message here for all our neighbors in Raleigh. I urge all residents of all the diverse communities within the City to read and take note.

Raleigh: Asphalt Jungle?

Raleigh: Asphalt Jungle?

The issue of persistent toxic pollution at abandoned industrial sites is not a site design problem. There is simply no way that rezoning for high-density residential development – of any type or design – should be allowed on asphalt plant sites until probable threats have been scientifically assessed and addressed, using modern methods.